“A ball! It is not Archie, I am sure, who would like a ball,” said Mrs. Rowland from the sofa, where Eddy had been sitting by her, in an attitude of respectful adoration for some time. He had cast repeated startling glances at Marion, calling her observation while he was so engaged. And Marion, seated at a distance with a book held up in front of her face, gave way now and then to little bursts of laughter, which she quickly repressed. It was infinitely ludicrous to Marion that any one should pretend to advise Mrs. Rowland, a woman of that age; but Eddy, she thought, played his part to perfection, and it was the funniest thing in the world. Rosamond was seated at the piano, playing as it were in an undertone, and for her own pleasure, various bits of music, one suggesting another, as one verse of poetry suggests another. She was a good musician, but she did not attempt to play to so indifferent an audience, though Rowland was always certainly civil in his desire to “have a little music,” when he came into the drawing-room after dinner. The good man knew that this was the right thing, and that Miss Saumarez would expect to be asked, and sat and yawned dutifully through what he privately thought to himself “just a terrible jingle,” out of respect to his guest. But Rowland had not left the dining-room on this occasion. He had a playfellow of his own who had dined with him, and was now engaging him in much more congenial talk. Archie was not much more educated in music than his father; but there was in his unpossessed being a power of perception, only half developed, of beautiful things. A sonata would have disconcerted him as much as it did Rowland; but the bits of melody that Rosamond was playing, and which he called in his simplicity tunes, seemed to make an atmosphere about her which was poetically appropriate, and filled the background of the large partially lighted sitting-room. The group on the sofa, with Marion’s detached figure full in the light of a lamp, seemed like a group on the stage, carrying on the thread of some half-comprehended story. Rosamond and the music belonged to a different sphere. There were shaded candles upon the piano, throwing a white light upon a pair of white hands, moving softly over the ivory keys; behind, the curtains were drawn back from one of the rounded windows, a line of moonlight came in, and in the distance from the corner in which Archie was seated unseen there was a glimmer visible of the distant waters of the Clyde, in glistening life and movement under the white blaze of the moon. Archie’s heart was full of strange and uncomprehended emotion. He was in a new world, listening to those soft strains which touched him as the light might touch a being coming to life, and feeling the vague enchantment of the night, the presence, like a charm, of the half seen figure, half dark half light, at the piano, and this subtle atmosphere in which she breathed. He had said very